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He gave me his trust. He called me brother.; TW: Harsh homophobia and general crassness and language.

((TW: Harsh homophobia and general crassness and language.))((Permission from Brackie and backslash))

“Hello?”

Fucking asshole faggot.

Alex Crosby had never forgotten Cochise and honestly he might as well have never left. He’d moved to Kingman High because Ma had finally moved in with her boyfriend and suddenly Alex had a sister and a home on the other side of town, all that shit. One of those surprise-type moments in life even if he’d seen it coming for years up the road. Like, he’d done the whole ‘be a good brother’-type stuff. Allara- Sis- had been one of those quiet draw-y types. Charles- stepdad- had turned out ace at baseball. Family life and school life had been all kinds of cool. Alex had been on the up since Sophomore year. He was hoping he’d get scouted out when he moved on to ASU this fall.

Still, he’d never forgotten the old boy Coyotes. Actually impossible to because they pounded the Bulldog’s asses dry on the diamond every other week. That aside. Alex had never forgotten his roots. Ben, dumbass Jerry, Cris... hell that weirdo Morales kid, throw him on in. Like a second family. Parties back on the other other side of town always had a slot on the VIP list for ‘Alex’ plus one ‘a couple cases of whiskey’. Besides, the dating pool had better genes Cochise side. Smarter, sexier, even if Alex was no longer rocking that old red and gold.

The news pundit folks, they liked to make retarded assumptions about what Cochise kids were and weren’t. ‘Profiles’, they liked to call them. Profiling was the fucking term they used on immigrants and shit right? Jesus.

They said shit like ‘quiet, possibly socially withdrawn’, or ‘parental issues that could potentially produce blah blah’. None of those asshole suit-and-tie types knew what Alex knew. They didn’t know, like, the little things and all that. Those hopes and dreams spilled out over a table of cards and half-empty sodas. That kinda shit, cliche and girly sure but nothing wrong with that sort of thing now and again. The empty suit folk didn’t have a goddamn clue what they were saying is what Alex was getting at. They looked at the kids per point of ratings and dollar of ad revenue or something all kinds of fucked. Alex saw the real deal, the mothers whose sons and daughters had been stolen from them. Ma had cooked homemade stuff, dinner kinda food, Alex had brought it around to some of the houses of his former teammates. He’d damn near choked on his condolences sometimes. Not the manliest thing in the world, to tear up and cry and all, but that sort of thing just got to him. His friends were ripped from this world and from their loved ones and so few people actually gave a damn.

Survival of the Fittest. All those words had meant to Alex before was, like, metal detectors at stadiums and hippie protests and shit. Now it was all he ever heard about. Sometimes crept up on him when he couldn’t sleep at night, polluting his thoughts when he was tugging at a sweat-slicked pillow and trying to count sheep. Faces he’d once known, bleaching to bones on a beach far away from home. Morbid ass imagery, that.

He hadn’t intended to watch the videos. He wasn’t some creep or sicko who wanted to see that sort of thing. He had respect for the dead.

It had been Sis who’d told him his name had come up. Locker room talk, she’d said, some girls mentioning him when they hadn’t realized she’d been lurking on the other side of the bench. She’d told him everything and his first thought had been:

Who the fuck was ‘Maxim Kehlenbrink’?

And the rest had followed. It had taken Alex a few searches to get it right because the name alone was fucking stupid. Too many syllables to be coherent.

He’d recognized the fat face and the caterpillar brows, after a few minutes of watching awkward scuttling around in the dark.

Shit, how many years had it been? Ben’s fifteenth had since become hazy memories of dancing on his old Freshman flame Carrie with two arms somewhere up in the air. The faggier shit had been drowned out in cheap whiskey, the sort of overpriced junk Alex had used to drink while not knowing better.

Maxim. Right, that dude. Alex had almost closed the stream then, a bit afraid he’d see Ben or Jerry or someone else dying on camera. Maxim was hardly a consideration. His wasn’t really a life worth caring about, like, he was a prototypical weird ass liberal Cochise kid. Unattractive, uninteresting, obviously unsympathetic. He doubted Maxim would have gotten up to anything besides dying anyways. Kid obviously didn’t know his way around a shaving razor, let alone a real weapon.

…

“... That you liked me, just as much as I liked you...”

Alex had needed a long walk and a cold shower after that one.

So that was it, huh? Lie on camera and get some petty ass revenge. Alex wasn’t really mad, he was telling himself. It was just, like, pitiful. Pathetic. ‘Forgive yourself’. Damn faggot hadn’t even realized Alex had never given a shit. Just the amount of shits you’d need to give when you’d been force tongue-raped by some walking human trash, right? Fucking hell, Alex had let the dude off easy! That shit had been over. Dead on arrival. Out of sight and out of mind. Everyone had fucking moved on with their life. Except one person hadn’t.

And he’d turned Alex’s life into a brief living hell. Reporters, tabloids, random tween bloggers with ninety-nine cent store notepads. Chasing him up and down the street, asking about his relations to B018. His feelings on being an LGB-whatever-the-fuck whose life had been exposed to potentially millions of viewers. His history. It would have been a damn laugh if it hadn’t been so cringe-worthy. ‘History’. Only damn history they needed to know was the condom and cigarette trail he’d left with girls this and that side of Kingman.

He’d thought crazy exes were hard to stomach. Paparazzi didn’t even have the decency to call obsessively before they came knocking.

It was all down to, like, Alex didn’t even know. He’d found his thoughts turning back to Maxim with alarming frequency, in the quieter siesta hours of the scorching summer days as they dragged by. It wasn’t like Maxim had ever made any sort of sense, honestly. Copy-paste that bumfuck over the warm hues of the Kingman desert sun and he was definitely was some kind of alien, a digital artifact or some other kinda Photoshop lingo. Maxim had stuck out like a sore thumb all hours of the day, get the kid a trenchcoat and he would have been a deadringer for a Virginia Tech or Columbine type. When had they ever even spoken? Freshman year History class or something, they’d both packed their schedules with remedial English. Probably for different reasons. Alex couldn’t begin to remember why he’d thought Maxim was any cool to hang around. Thinking back on it maybe it had been some kind of pity project or social experiment. Yeah, in hindsight. Made a ton of sense.

His bad. It was on him for thinking Maxim could have been anything but the pussy ass he’d turned out to be.

It was like, yeah. Alex got it. You’re a foreigner out of place, you’re gay when most people aren’t so cool with that sort of thing, pity party fucking boo hoo. Shit, Alex might have been willing to give the dude half a break even, if he hadn’t piledriven their lips together- almost in public no less- sans consent or concern or decency. Alex was only uncomfortable when a gay dude wanted to get it on with one specific dude named Alex Crosby. Any other dude whose butt you want it up? Whatever, no fucking skin off Alex’s bones. Out of sight out of mind. Not his fault not his problem. Maxim could have kissed and felt up whatever dudes he wanted to in his free time. No problem, none at all, maybe just hang out with Alex a little less, would have all been good. But instead he’d gone and crossed a line. Simple as that. He’d gone too far, broken a rule, broken Alex’s trust. He’d paid the price for it, underpaid if Alex was fucking honest. And somehow Alex was still the bad guy? Bull. Plus, shit.

Yeah, Maxim was obviously the one worthy of pity when lying his ass off to ruin some decent upstanding citizen’s life. When taking a hammer to some innocent woman’s head for no fucking reason. Maxim wasn’t an animal or a freak because he liked men, no, that just made him a fag. Admittedly not Alex’s preferred sort of company but it was just a damn preference. Nothing morally wrong with that, see, what was morally atrocious was bashing in the forehead of a girl with no rhyme or reason or… god, Alex had almost had to step out of his room to puke during that scene. At least Maxim had been promptly put down like the animal he’d turned out to be. Turned out there was justice in this world after all.

Yeah… Like, maybe if Maxim had never ended up on that island he might still have gone berko and tried to shoot up his school or burn down the local orphanage or something. Came back to that whole pity thing, really. Maxim was just one of those sorts who needed help or some shit and didn’t get it. Alex had shit all to do with it. That was what it came down to.

Ultimately Alex was still, like, moving on. Growing the fuck up. He wasn’t about to admit he’d ever made a mistake with that kid- only ‘mistake’ he’d ever made was letting Maxim von Hitler too close to the damn bottles, but Alex would say he’d probably been a bit too young and inexperienced back then. Hadn’t seen the signs or figured out the optimal plays.

See that was the real problem with Maxim wasn’t it? He hadn’t moved on. He’d just stewed in his own unreasonable and undeserved hatred and let it ruin his life instead of just up and manning the fuck up. Like, Alex? His share of problems too. Pops the original, the carrier of the ballsack Alex had originated from, he’d been a deadbeat. Druggie, heroin or some shit, last they’d heard he’d been shacked up with some trailer trash redhead up in Reno. Alex had hated that man, still did, but guess what Alex didn’t do in response? Shrivel up, close everyone off, and blame them for all the problems in his own life. Like, what the fuck. What kind of messed up punk brain even worked that way? Messed up punk brain of Maxim, apparently.

And now that brain was never going to think another perverse, polluted thought again. Talk shit, get hit.

Even now, yeah. Alex was doing something with his life, something that mattered. Cris- wherever the fuck he’d even vanished off to to drown his sorrows in weed and women- had put out an email for the entire Coyotes team. Something ‘blah blah I’m sad’ something ‘blah blah I didn’t watch the video but my Grandfather did and he’s lived through one hundred wars and built an entire home for his family with just his dick’, but the important part had been that Raina Rose- weird dorky girl, wicked smart head on a hot bod’s worth of shoulders though- had put out some kind of dying request to ‘make her club stop watching shitty anime’ and ‘fund new computer labs for Cochise’.

Shit all he could do about the first bit, but he’d put out some feelers on the second. They were going to arrange an informal game and picnic type thing between the Bulldogs and the Volunteers in Sumac and ticket proceeds would go to outfitting Cochise- a goddamn rival school- with new computers and books and shit. They’d pimp out a Kickstarter, maybe even get some celeb baseballers from elsewhere in the state to drop by. Alex had always wanted himself a Hardy signed bat.

So yeah, that was that. Alex wasn’t going to be hanging around his house, around this town much longer. He had a charity game to practice for, real friends to mourn, a college and a life to move onto.

Move forward. No point in looking back. That was all Alex could do. Maxim and his problems and his whatever, that was none of Alex’s business. Shame old Maxim hadn’t caught the message. But yeah. Alex was moving on with his adult ass life, and Maxim definitely couldn’t be saying the same.

Like, end of it all, what was the takeaway? After all the bullshit and the drama and the wondering if it all made any sense at all?